The Chinese People’s Literature Publishing House launched a New Year gift box, “Five Blessings for Spring: Humanistic Year’s Gift 2021”, in which five Spring Festival couplets with the word “Blessing” concealed the word “Woe”, which was discovered and questioned by netizens: “Can this still be used as a Chinese New Year gift? The People’s Literature Publishing House issued an emergency apology on the evening of the 1st, announcing that all the wrong products will be removed from the shelves and consumers will be refunded.
The Chinese online shopping platform Taobao can still see this “Five Blessings for Spring Festival – Humanities Yearly Gift 2021”, with prices varying from one online store to another, around 120 yuan (about $18.50) or less. Inside the gift box, in addition to the Spring Festival couplets, there is also a Chinese painted door god, a red envelope bag, and a Year of the Ox fortune sock.
The People’s Literature Publishing House was established in March 1951 as a national professional literary publishing house in China.
On the 1st, a Chinese netizen pointed out that this gift box from the People’s Literature Publishing House does not distinguish between “fortune” and “misfortune”, and one of the five “fortune” spring couplets is actually “misfortune”.
In response to this outrageous mistake, the People’s Literature Publishing House explained that the five characters were selected from the “Qigong Calligraphy Character Collection” by the late renowned Chinese calligrapher Qigong. The reason why the word “woe” was mistakenly included was due to “a lack of specialized research on calligraphy.
In the comment section of netizens below the People’s Literature Publishing House’s Weibo apology statement on the evening of the 1st, some Chinese people said, “What is lamentable is the overall quality of the publishing house and the publishers. Don’t use the excuse that you don’t know calligraphy, this is the People’s Literature Publishing House! This is the People’s Literature Publishing House, and no one could have caught such an absurd mistake.
The netizens also said, “It’s not a big deal, but it’s alarming. The fact that such a big publishing house would make such a mistake reflects the huge loopholes and deficiencies in humanities and social science Education. Some netizens also quipped that this really proves that “fortune and disaster go hand in hand”!
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